🚀 go-pugleaf

David Nottage <DNottage@SCOMHBR3.telecom.com.au> wrote:

>>OTOH, their DOS Basic compilers were fantastic.
>
>_What_ DOS Basic compilers??????. If they had any, why did they give the 
>idea up??

They had several versions of QuickBasic, Basic Professional 6.0, Basic PDS 
(Professional Development System) 7.x, and VB/DOS.

The 6.0 Professional has the distinction of being the last DOS Basic
released before the Great Divorce from IBM; it was able to compile
true .DLLs, for OS/2.  Had things gone differently, and NT (which was
under development at the time) retained its original designation as
OS/2 3, who knows where things would have gone?

Btw, the professional compilers were able to spit out .ASM source
code, as well as compiled .OBJ code.

Yes, they had DOS Basic compilers, and plenty of them (they even had
them *before* QB, but I only listed the ones with IDEs).  And, they
were good.  The code they created was blindingly fast, and compact;
you could also have a lot of fun with linker options.  Oh, and you
could either link them as standalone .EXEs, or, have them use a
library (effectively a dynamic-link-library, sans .DLL extension), and
with the professional versions, you could even compile and link your
own routines into the library.  (You could create your own libraries
with any of them, and even link versions that you could load into the
IDE for development -- shades of the .VBX to come -- but the pro versions
let you also create custom runtime-linked libraries.